[Bioc-devel] Guidelines for shiny packages

[Thomas Dybdal Pedersen]

Hi All

I’m in the process of getting package submitted to Bioconductor. The package is a pure shiny package and this has led to some - especially one question. For those not familiar with shiny apps, the code that makes these work resides in their own .R files outside of the R directory in a package. Consequently they are not ‘build’ and whatever is in there is not part of the package namespace. The functionality of my GUI requires several packages, but for the reasons given above they are not imported into the package namespace. Still they are needed for the package to function properly. The main question is thus: How to state this hard dependency in the DESCRIPTION file without getting knocked on the head for not importing your dependencies during check and BiocCheck?

Another related question/proposal is: Based on the interest in Shiny at BioC 2014 it seems as we should anticipate a lot of shiny based packages. As one of the core principles of the Bioconductor project is to promote good coding style and high quality packages I was wondering whether it would make sense to begin working on a set of guidelines for developing shiny based GUIs, as their structure and style differs a lot from standard R packages. Just a suggestion - I’ll happily join such an effort…

best

Thomas